On Mar. 8, 2012, an international team led by researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute announced they had sequenced the gorilla genome (western lowland gorilla). Their work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and others.

The results were published in Nature. The comparison, along with fossil evidence, places the human and chimpanzee species divergence between 5.5 and 7 million years ago. Their common ancestors split from gorillas 8.5 to 12 million years ago.